What is prayer? How do we pray? How do we keep away from that silly notion that God is some kind of divine genie with a lamp or a Santa Claus doling out answers to our requests? Prayer is so much more that getting things from God or competing with others for God’s attention. And prayer needs to be saved from the injustices that can to flow from it when we think God answers our prayers and not someone else’s, or acts on our requests when our requests have consequences for the lives of others and of the Earth itself.

In this meditation on the nature of prayer, I rescue prayer from the hackneyed habits and assumptions around prayer that keep intelligent people from praying and from the formality and institutionalism of prayer that can paralyze those who desire to pray

“Desire is Divine” | based on Psalm 84 and 1 Corinthians 6.19-20, and a reading from Barbara Brown Taylor. August 22, 2021

Our readings from the international Revised Common Lectionary today invite us to explore the nature of prayer.

Our first reading, Psalm 84, is an expression of prayer that is more about desire than about duty, more about being human than having the right things to say.

The Book of Psalms in our Bible is a collection of 150 prayers and poems and songs that bear witness to the many ways our spiritual ancestors prayed. John Calvin of Geneva, the sixteenth century Protestant reformer and founder of the Presbyterian tradition, taught that the Book of Psalms contains the whole anatomy of the human soul: from feelings of love and desire to despair and rage.

Contemporary spiritual teacher Barbara Brown Taylor, whom we’ve heard from this morning in our third reading, has learned from the biblical Book of Psalms how to create prayers she calls nature psalms, bedtime psalms, and psalms that express our pain and our pleasure. She’s learned how to allow ancient psalms to shape our praying lives so that we can not only more authentically experience the divine, but also more authentically experience ourselves. Tutored by the ancient psalms, Barbara Brown Taylor has made prayer entirely ordinary—learning how to make friends with the dirt of her garden, to live more reverently (and patiently) while standing in line at a checkout counter, and finding the courage, through prayer, to lean into the cycles of darkness and light, death and new life that come to us all.

Prayer for her isn’t a duty; prayer is born of a desire to be more fully and authentically human, to be honest and raw and real in the presence of the divine.

That’s what the psalms do for us.

For decades I’ve prayed the psalms. I’ve memorized parts of them. For a season in my life I worked on my own version of abbreviating them, praying one psalm a week every morning and night and by the end of the week writing my own two to four sentence summary of its essence.

There are psalms I love—psalms that inspire and nourish me. And there are psalms I could do without. I can even say there are psalms I dislike intensely. But even those psalms are helpful. Psalm 137, for example, is a psalm that expresses rage at an enemy. The person whose prayer became Psalm 137 was so enraged by the violence of the Babylonian army against his people that he cursed not only the soldiers and their commanders but he asked God to “dash their children against the rocks.”

Thankfully, God isn’t a genie in a lamp who grants our three wishes regardless of the consequences. God doesn’t do what we ask. In prayer we encounter God, we experience God, we participate with God, we foster an intentional and intimate relationship with God.

Prayer invites us to be ourselves, even our most untidy, unpresentable, and even ugly selves. That Psalm 137, in all its ugly, hateful, and violent rage, is in the Bible as evidence that prayer is an invitation to authenticity—that our prayers can and ought to open us to the full anatomy of our human experience from feelings of love and desire to despair and rage.

I have often helped people to pray in the midst of despair or anger or confusion or extreme happiness by pointing them to the psalms and a guide. “Don’t worry about praying like a pastor. Don’t think about theology. Don’t worry about what God thinks about what you say. Here’s what I know: pray what you feel. What do you want? What is it that’s rising up within you, yearning for expression? Say that. Express that. No matter how untidy or scary or messy. God can handle it. God can handle the mess. What God doesn’t want, what God can’t handle, is hiding, denial, performing, and nice but petty pleasantries.”

And when people pray what they feel, not what they think they ought to pray, then they're engaged in the only kind of prayer that matters and they're participating with God in their own becoming. And that is what prayer is ultimately for.

Prayer isn’t about getting stuff from God. It’s about being real with God and with ourselves.

So the Book of Psalms teaches us to take off our mask and fancy clothes: be real, raw, honest, messy; no relationship can be built on falsehoods and pretension. What’s true with us is true with God.

And then add to this truth, the lesson of Psalm 84: follow the desire of your soul, your innermost being:

How lovely is your dwelling place,

O Lord of hosts!

My soul longs, indeed it faints

for the courts of the Lord;

my heart and my flesh sing for joy

to the living God.

Here’s prayer that’s born from the human emotion of longing, yearning, and desire. There is no sense of duty in this prayer, is there? The pray-er is not asking God for things, not raging against enemies, not parading before God their problems, not telling God what’s wrong with the world. This is a person who is expressing a desire to be with and near the divine presence, like a child wanting to be with his mother or a lover yearning to be with the one they love. There’s an intensity here that’s too often lost because it’s in the Holy Book. And it’s lost because so many of us have curbed our desires.

We were taught that what we want or desire doesn’t matter—that we are not supposed to be selfish, that we aren’t allowed to truly express our desires. We were taught that wanting what we want, desiring what gives us pleasure, is self-indulgent. So many of us stopped feeling desire and in doing so we lost something of the inner fire that is so necessary for a full-blooded, well-lived life. When we shut down desire and deny the possibility of pleasure then prayer becomes responsible, respectable, dutiful, obedient. And while that may be common, these things kill a life of prayer and slowly starve our lives of the vitality the divine desires for us. The quality of our lives depends on the quality of our prayers, the vitality of our lives arises from the vitality of our prayers.

"What is saving my life now,” writes theologian and author Barbara Brown Taylor, “is the conviction that there is no spiritual treasure to be found apart from the bodily experiences of human life on earth. My life depends on engaging the most ordinary physical activities with the most exquisite attention I can give them. My life depends on ignoring all touted distinctions between the secular and the sacred, the physical and the spiritual, the body and the soul. What is saving my life now is becoming more fully human, trusting that there is no way to God apart from real life in the real world.”

Get real about what your body and soul desires, make authenticity about your humanity the stuff of your prayers, and you’ll rescue your life for meaning, passion, wonder, and joy.